Please Sir, Can I Have Some Work? A Lamentation from the Lost Generation

It’s been 162 days since I was last in paid employment. Not that I’m counting or anything, unless counting means monitoring with an intensity that borders on deranged.  I first heard the phrase ‘Lost Generation’ a few days ago and for some reason it reminded me of Steven Spielberg’s The Lost World, as if unemployed graduates are like pre-historic dinosaurs threatening the very survival of the human race with our futility.

My first proper paid job was with a quango for a year and a half, mostly doing administrative jobs taking overpriced sandwiches to overpaid suits who would complain about working past 4.30pm on a Friday. They generously offered to extend my contract for another few months – incidentally, at the time I would have used the word ‘generously’ in a sardonic fashion but in retrospect I appreciate just how generous it really was – but I declined. Now the words: Make, Bed, Your and Lie might be flying around, and to that I challenge you to spend a year and a half as a poorly paid paper-shuffling android and then jump for joy when you're offered another 3 months as a poorly paid paper-shuffling android, after which you'll probably be fired.   

At the moment I’m doing an unpaid internship made possible by the fact that my long-suffering, generous-hearted mother is happy to let me continue to loaf around her house looking morose and eating chunks of cheese out of the fridge like a very depressed, oversized rodent. She knows she can’t get away with the “when I was your age” lectures because she’d have to finish them with “I didn’t have the urge to drink lukewarm pinot grigio out of a jug whilst watching reruns on ITV2”.

There are quite a few interns at my workplace, all with good degrees, clean shirts and the kind of can-do, pumped-up attitude that has recruitment consultants drooling into their lattes. Every morning it’s the same old, “So, found anything?” False, beaming smile, “Yeah, yeah I found a job filing tax returns for an Icelandic fish-gutter based in Svalbard. It’s unpaid, but at least it’s some more experience on the CV.” Then we shuffle mournfully over to our desks, clutching our own-brand cups of tea and continue with our data entry. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Tab, Enter, Repeat, Sob.     

I almost wish I’d gone for one of those sales jobs you see advertised with a title like “Senior Managerial Retail Executive, Earn 100K in your first year!£!£!£!£!”. At least I’d have some money to go with my misery.  And yes okay, for all of you thinking what a self-indulgent, jumped-up little twerp I am, I must admit that thinking about my situation rationally I am in a much better position than most.

I am fortunate to be able to live in central London with an obliging parent whilst many of my acquaintances have been forced back home to far less glamorous locations: Basingstoke, Burnley, Bolton. There's nothing wrong with any of these places of course, unless you are an eager young graduate keen to make your fortune in which case it's like being promised the world and then finding out that, actually, the world's not for sale but how about this nice 1 bed semi off the M6?

I am lucky to have savings so I can afford to do CV-plumping internships rather than having to graft in a cafe or bar to earn rent money. I met a friend in India who is an incredibly bright, motivated young woman from oop North, keen to work in the international development sector. She scrimped and saved every penny for months so that she could go to India to do research with a disability charity, to get the requisite developing country experience you need to make it in the industry. She's back home now, applying for everything and anything she might be remotely qualified for, desperate to make it to London to kick-start her career (I don't have the heart to tell her things in London are almost as dire as the rest of the country).

And yet, whilst I can appreciate my good fortune compared with some, misery is not objective. The woman who has just lost a beloved parent doesn't, in the immediate aftermath of her grief think ‘thank god I'm not a Somalian orphan.’

So, is there any hope? Of course there is. It takes just one application and one employer to see a job, a skill or a spark on your CV for you to be lifted out of the wastelands of unemployment and elevated to a higher state of being. As a loved one is fond of saying to me, I need “relentless positivity” and a firm conviction that I am the ideal candidate for someone, somewhere. 

After all, tomorrow is another day. Lucky number 163…